Month: November 2005

I’ve been mulling this idea over since I read Wisconsin Death Trip last December. Bear Lake is going to be a game about the life of a small town as told through the reprehensible deeds of its most prominent citizens.

I watched Lifeboat last night, and it needs to be added to the bibliography for Open Boat. Every character has an Issue, PTA style, and it makes me wonder whether Open Boat is currently too shallow – the only character

I had a good talk with my brother about some potential Roach sequels today. The format is straightforward – find a heirarchical organization, add 6 Events, 9 characters, and tweak 12 Enthusiasms. Add new cards and you are good to

The Roach manuscript (the 45th revision since we started counting) is in Patrick’s hands. Over Thanksgiving’s long weekend, he’s doing the preliminary layout while Jason is re-scanning all the art at 1200 dpi, just to be sure.

OK, this is odd. I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here, but apparently somebody has picked up Howard Thompson’s lapsed trademark for The Fantasy Trip and “re-imagined” the rules, which are functionally identical but worded differently. Apparently this is

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the Shab-al-Hiri Roach have been edited. Once the copy editing was complete (two passes by two different people), Jason took the whole shebang and physically cut it into chunks. It was then pretty easy

Emily writes a fascinating Actual Play post, sort of. This is really cool to me, because although I’ve never really lost the capacity to engage in pretend play like this, I’ve never considered it from a design perspective.

I’m ruminating on a new project as we’re prepping the Roach for production. It emerged from my most recent game of Dogs, where I found myself (as I always do) feeling real sympathy for the town. What, I thought to